Music

This upcoming Saturday November the 18th is the return of the Sonic & SEGA Fan Jam, 2017 edition, taking place at the Embassy Suites in Savannah, Georgia. You can join Matt Mannheimer, formerly of Tails Channel, and some of his Sonic Retro and Sonic Fan Games HQ pals David the Lurker, NeoHazard, Volg Shan and your ol’ pal Bart as we discuss all things Sonic the Hedgehog. Those who are able to join us in person are also eligible for winning mystery prizes, What are they? You’ll have to come and find out for yourself when our panel starts at 4:15PM.

Those unable to attend you can watch us via a livestream of the event from this link which will go live Saturday morning. You can follow along with the day’s schedule and further updates from the event’s Twitter account here.

A little late, but better than never!

Zoned – a nostalgic trip (at the speed of sound) down Sonic The Hedgehog’s memory lane. Zoned aims to pay homage to the creativity and impact of Sonic The Hedgehog’s legacy by reimagining a selection of OSC’s favourite compositions from the golden age of 90s Sonic The Hedgehog games. The musical style is OSC’s signature blend of Electro-Funk and Retrowave with sprinklings of Chiptune. Included on this album are tracks from both 8 and 16 bit versions of Sonic The Hedgehog 1 and 2, Sonic The Hedgehog 3 and Sonic Chaos. Also interweaved into this album are soundbites from the games themselves, excerpts from 90s SEGA TV commercials, and dialogue from various video game documentaries that discuss both the significance of SEGA and Sonic The Hedgehog in the history and develop of video games and video game music.

If you’d like to grab a download of the album and throw some support their way, check out the bandcamp page @ https://opussciencecollective.bandcamp.com/album/zoned

So the weekend rolls around again and finally (at least if you’re a 9-5 worker in the UK), you can afford to put your feet up, crack open a beverage of choice and enjoy yourself for a couple of days.

After the success we enjoyed last week with the Sonic Generations stream – well, popularity-wise, anyway; gameplay-wise, I wasn’t particularly successful but hey, I’m out of practice and it’s something to work on – we’ve decided another stream might be a good idea for a weekend event again. In lieu of this, and combined with the fact that the creator behind popular fangames Sonic BTS and ATS LakeFeperd has announced a kickstarter for his new, original project named Spark The Electric Jester, we decided a stream of Sonic After The Sequel could be a great idea.

Don’t panic – it’s not tonight, so you have time to plan ahead if you were particularly interested in seeing the game played. We’re going to kick things off tomorrow (Saturday 1st August) at 8pm BST/3pm EST/12pm PST.

Returning to your regular weekly scheduling, my counterpart TimmiT graced the front page with a new Monday Links and it is with great pleasure that I bring you the return of Something For The Weekend! And there was much rejoicing.

Now, I wanted to feature a bit of music again this weekend and this time, the tunes are courtesy of Retro member Sean Evans. Coming from his album ‘Sonic Tempo’, Sean has created a soundtrack reminiscent of Sonic CD in both instrumentation and theme. An excerpt from his description of the album goes “When Sonic wakes, he discovers he’s on the Miracle Planet, but what’s more is that he appears to be in the Miracle Planet’s galaxy! In the distance Sonic can see a black hole, slowly sucking the planet in. The only explanation is that someone has been tampering with the flow of time, and if Sonic doesn’t hurry, Miracle Planet might just fade away, and him along with it!”

I highly recommend giving these tracks a listen as it’s clear Sean has put some serious love into them and they would sound right at home in a classic Sonic game. Check the bottom of this article for a playlist or click here to go straight to the album’s SoundCloud page.

In other news, community regular HelenBaby has transferred the running of the Sonic London meets to new organizer, ForeverSonic of RadioSEGA fame! In celebration of this, he will be hosting a comeback meet on Sunday 26th July 2015 at Regents Park in London. The event is an open invitation and you can sign up here or express your interest and ask questions in HelenBaby’s forum thread here.

And with all that said, I leave you with this weekend’s tunes. Enjoy! Continue Reading

Last week my ‘Something for the Weekend’ feature was on the subject of GameChops’ awesome new ‘Spindash’ album, full of dance remixes of classic Sonic tracks. Hopefully if you enjoyed that taste you looked a little more into GameChops and what else they’ve done.

PROTIP: There’s some mighty fine stuff there.

But I’m not here to link another playlist or album, not exactly. Today I actually wanted to talk about why GameChops, as a concept, is actually really cool and why you should be following them closely.

Founed by Dj CUTMAN, all of the music GameChops produces is video game-related. You could have probably guessed that – but did you also guess that supporting GameChops financially actually puts money in several pockets? This comes from the way in which the label operates through their partners at Loudr.fm. According to their website, ‘Loudr.fm is an incredible new platform for musicians who create cover songs, like our game remixes. In the past, acquiring mechanical licenses was an expensive and time consuming process. Loudr has revolutionized this by providing a distribution platform with built-in licensing.’

What this effectively means is that when an artist remixes a piece of video game music, be it Sonic, Mega Man, whatever you like; when you support that artist, you are actually supporting them and also the rights-holders of the original track. This effectively means that GameChops remixes are all officially licensed, after a fashion.

So another week draws to a close and just in case you missed it, here’s a link to my Monday counterpart TimmiT’s Monday Links from this week. While I won’t go over all of the news of the week here (otherwise what would be the point in reading anything other than this column?) I will briefly mention that a playable build of Sonic Xtreme was released for PC this week. Yes, I’m serious. Go see.

Now, bringing things swiftly back to where they should be on a Friday, here’s something for you to take a gander at – GameChops, a record label for video game remixes, have released a compilation of Sonic-themed remixes by several of their artists entitled ‘Spindash’. Do you like remixes? Do you like dance music? Do you like Sonic? Of course you bloody do. Featured above for your listening pleasure is the album’s teaser trailer, but here’s a link to a playlist consisting of the album in it’s entirety. However, if you want to give a little back to the incredible talent that produced these tracks, you can easily do so by purchasing the album for download from Loudr, iTunes or Google Play for $10 (links to each store to follow).

If this kind of pumping electronica doesn’t get your weekend off to a good start, well, I don’t know what will.

So it’s been a pretty okay week for news, with the Sonic Runners reveal yesterday (it’s looking fairly good by the way) and forum member Jollyroger managing to get the leaked POV version of Sonic Xtreme to run on Saturn hardware – and while Monday links was packed with cool things to get your teeth into and is always a great start to the week (thanks TimmiT!), I’ve taken it upon myself to give you something to end the week on as well. Usually, this will be something like a mash-up or remix, news of some event going on over the weekend or, you know, generally weekend-y things.

Today, in keeping with the Sonic 3 Remastered campaign (it was featured on the Daily Star website of all things!), here’s some fantastic musical work courtesy of Leila ‘Woofle’ Wilson. This is a fantastic playlist of alternate takes on famous Sonic 3 tracks, noticeably different from their counterparts in the original game, but still fitting with the mood of each stage. I’m getting some Death Egg vibes from the Launch Base Zone track – which, considering the background of the stage, is only appropriate I guess.

Anyway, to cut this short – if you’ve finished work or school for the week, put your feet up, unwind, crack open a favored beverage and have a listen. Enjoy your weekend.